At the end of the day it’s a perfect storm

The mysteries of cultural transmission are propelling “perfect storm” up the cliche charts at the moment. Presumably Mr Clooney and the 2000 movie of the same name is at least partially to blame but it’s interesting how 8 years later it suddenly seems to be catching on.

Whilst nowhere near as popular as the teeth-grating conversation-stopper “at the end of the day” (17.4m mentions in Google) “perfect storm” is still clocking in a quite respectable 3.5m Google results.

To put this into perspective “in the final analysis” only registers 1.5m times.

“Perfect storm” is already being nicely mangled in things I’ve been reading “because … like ‘perfect’ means ‘good’ doesn’t it?” So, I read some corporate guru talking the other day about how for his commodity supply company there was a ‘perfect storm’ of influences coming together to increase sales to China…

I don’t know whether it’s my monocle getting in the way or something but it is interesting how a lot of these phrases are kind of conversation-terminators.

The original meaning of ‘perfect storm’ of course was talking about a freak-convergence of various totally unpredictable factors coming together – “I mean, it’s not as if I could predict any of this credit crunch fallout, it was a ‘perfect storm’.”

And likewise it’s not as if I expect you to respond to my summing up because once the day has ended it’s like-kinda finished you know? Just as my analysis is ‘final’.

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Article posted by @Drivelry on September 1, 2008

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